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Month: December 2011

Since this is the last Friday of the year, I thought I’d handle the New Year’s admin now. If you want to see how I fared with the 2011 “guidelines”, you’re more than welcome to go check out my other blog, Taking Charge of My Life.

Without further ado, my goals for 2012:

Writing:

I want to finish Doorways before 30 June.

I will query Doorways on 1 July.

I want to finish the WiP2 rewrite by 30 September.

I want to finish the Don’t Look Back draft by 31 December.

I want to finish at least one draft of the musical libretto by 31 December.

I might want to look at Guardian again.

Reading:

I want to read more (crit partners’ manuscripts don’t count).

I want to read Shakespeare, Austen and Martin.

Life:

Auditions, auditions, auditions.

I want to master at least intermediate cooking.

I want to spend more time designing.

I want to brush up on my French and Mandarin (at least one of the two) and take another language.

I want to take classes in a musical instrument. Either piano or guitar.

I also want to get out more next year. Cabin fever never did suit me.

Since I achieved four goals in 2011, I want to achieve six in 2012.

So that’s me for the year. I hope you enjoyed my blog as much as I enjoyed all of yours.

Before I sign off, I just want to say cheers.

2011 was more than a little bumpy, but your support made it much easier to get through the year. Here’s to 2012. If it’s the last one, know I wouldn’t want to spend it without you. If it isn’t, thank goodness, because then I’ll see you for 2013.

After spending about two thirds of the 27th mourning the loss of my drafts, I decided that the term my self-imposed exile from home was over.

I ran straight to the arms of my beloved characters and immersed myself in the world of my creation.

It was like a balm to my soul.

Sure, the loss hurt, but it could have been so much worse. I could have lost more than I did. As it is, I still have all of my Doorways edits, so that’s what I’m going to do until I get over the worst of my pain at losing WiP2.

Now that I’m back with my first love, I almost can’t believe how long I’ve stayed away from it. Even though I enjoy everything else that I write, I miss my characters from Doorways every moment that I’m not with them.

Sad, but true.

Anyway, I feel happier now. More at peace with what happened. Soon I will be able to look at my WiP2 rough draft without thinking of the huge space that looms after it. Then I will be able to start again, excited to know that I will be improving on what I have written.

But right now, Doorways is exactly what I need.

Do you have a story and/or characters that you love more than any others?

Thank you all very much for your sympathy and support! That’s what made me able to get back to Doorways so soon.

So… last night sucked. Well, last night and this morning, since I spent four hours trying to recover my lost manuscripts.

Yes. Lost.

They can’t be active undeleted. That can’t be system restored. They can’t be called up out of the hundreds of back-ups made, because according to the writing program I used, they never existed.

So I can’t open my Doorways rough rewrite, but I have a copy of it to Word, if I decline all edits I made.

Half of the original opening for Don’t Look Back is missing, but at least I hand-wrote it over to my notebook for NaNoWriMo.

Guardian seems to open and refuse at random, but I’ve managed to copy/paste it to Word.

No. My problem lies with Eden’s Son I.E. WiP2. The entire rewrite is gone. Poof. Up into the ether. All of the back-ups only read up to before I started it. There are no Word versions because I didn’t send it to anyone to read. I didn’t copy/paste because a) it’s freaking tedious and b) it’s safe as long as I back up? Right?

Turns out no. Turns out backing up manually to create an extra copy obliterated months worth of work in less than a second.

So lesson number 1: NEVER use freeware. It’s worth as much as you paid for it. Number 2: NEVER assume that programmers think further than the tips of their noses. They don’t. So that thing that seems obvious to do because it’s what is supposed to happen? Don’t do it before going to help and making doubly sure that that isn’t the one that in his own words “DO NOT DO UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.”

But now I have to wonder: If I risk losing my work if I don’t back-up and if I do? What action should I take? Print every page every freaking time? Because apparently it means bullshit to people that you spent most of a year on the work you lost, because apparently: “It can’t vanish.” is a satisfactory reply.

But like I said. I spent four hours last night looking for the data. My mother spent two this morning. It isn’t there.

I am starting to accept this. Slowly, but it’s hard, because now I know that my end of January goal for WiP2 is screwed. In fact, I downloaded the trial for Scrivener last night with the plan to buy the program in a month, but you know what? I don’t want to write. I don’t want to even look at my rough draft. Because all that I can see is the end of the document that’s supposed to be followed by 26 chapters or thirty five thousand hard-fought words.

And then I want to kill something.

But on the flip-side, I’ve never thought I could lose over a hundred thousand words of everything and survive, but here I am.

So… what’s your record loss? Got any horror stories to share? How did you recover? Any Scrivener users out there? Is the program any good? Any other drafting programs that I can look at?

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

Gustave Flaubert

When a reader starts a book, he/she is drawn into the story for many reasons. When the book is a piece of fiction, odds are that one of reasons for being drawn in is because it isn’t part of/about the reader. It’s an escape. A way to live in another place, to see another life. To hear another voice.

It’s a wonderful thing, our power to draw people into the stories we write, our ability to help them escape because of their willingness to suspend disbelief for just long enought to drift into our imaginary landscapes. At the same time, it’s a challenge, because once that link is made, it’s fragile. So fragile that the smallest error could break it.

I call this break the “Hey wait” moment, after the reaction that I have when something stretches my suspension of disbelief too far. As in: “Hey wait, why the hell would the character do this?” or… “Hey wait, the solution to this apparently insurmountable problem is simple and provided for in the rules of the universe.”

Broadly speaking, “Hey wait” moments happen because of two reasons:

Firstly, because the author didn’t pay attention or due regard to all of the important details in his/her story. A good example of this would be when the author forces the character into doing something that’s clearly against his/her nature. Another one would be plot holes.

The second cause of a “Hey wait” would be the author showing him/herself. This one’s a bit more difficult for a writer to catch, because it has nothing to do with the story, plot or characters. It’s something a bit more subtle. It’s when the story’s voice is wrong, e.g. rich florid prose when the view point character is no nonsense or a stark narration when the character’s supposed to be a fun loving kid. It’s when the dialogue is forced, especially when it’s forced to reveal backstory. In other words: the “As you know” dialogues. Those are my pet hates. They truly make me want to tear a book apart.

Another way that a writer can show him/herself is by writing all stories to the exact same formula. I’m not talking about the preference of certain types of characters or themes. I’m talking about telling different stories according to a single pattern. One that if figured out, will ruin any future story by the author. There’s a bestselling author who wrote some great stories that I loved, until I worked out how he wrote them. How did I figure it out? Because each one of them is written in a certain way. And I see that way as cheating.

So the moral here: if you want to cheat, go ahead, just don’t keep doing it and assume that no one will notice. Unless you don’t care.

I wanted to put this post up last night, but because of the nature of the Christmas holidays, I wasn’t able to, but I just have to show off this year’s tree.

I admit that it looks a little bare in daylight…

But at night, it is magical:

﻿

Before I sign off, I want to ask that you please think of/pray for my friend Helen, who lost her husband in a car accident yesterday. She’s about to enter a massive battle, as the accident has triggered a serious illness that she had when she was younger.

This really got me thinking, as we forget how fortunate we are to have everyone who is sharing Christmas with us. So if you haven’t yet, go hug them and tell them you love them.

During my forced time off from my rewrite, something occurred to me about a moment in my WiP2 that’s going to be a bit problematic. It’s one of those watershed moments where a character makes a choice that will determine the course his life will take. So it makes for excellent story.

Only… the motivation was off. Or more accurately, the perception of the motivation was off.

To my mind, characterization is the reason why a character is who he is. Motivation is the reason why a character does what he does.

Actually, it’s more the reason behind the reason. For example, commitment phobia might be a reason why a guy won’t marry, but the reaction that caused the phobia as a result of something in the past is the motivation. In the case above, distrust as a result of his wife cheating on him with his best man would be his motivation.

Characters can have more than one motivation, but most importantly, each motivation will have a significant effect on how the character reacts to others or on how he lives and sees life. For example, Mr. Commitment-Phobe might start distrusting women in general, and then struggle with the idea of marriage as he falls in love. But then, since he was betrayed, he’ll also very likely struggle to trust his love-interest around his friends or vice versa.

It’s vitally important that the motivation is carried through the character as far as it can conceivably go, because if it doesn’t go all the way, the motivation will be seen as weak and it will impact on the story. If I stumbled over the above example in the story, I would think that his phobia was on over-reaction if he didn’t show at least some indication of it when his love interest is talking with his best friend. If this didn’t happen, it cheapens the situation and takes the depth out of the story.

Another important factor to consider: perception vs reality. What I mean with this is the reader’s perception based on the character’s actions vs. the actual reason behind the action as known to the author. It’s not that common that a character’s motivation is kept from the reader until the end of the story, since the conflict that comes as a result of character motivations can make for some wonderful story, because the journey of discovery of the character’s motivation makes for good reading. But not if the reader leaps to the wrong conclusion as to what motivates a character.

If the reader decides that a reader won’t marry because he’s selfish in some way, there’s a problem. Because whether or not this conclusion was wrong, it will affect how the reader will perceive the story’s events, as well as whether he/she will be able to stick through the story all the way to the big reveal.

The reader can be kept on the right track, though, through leaving clues to the motivation or by showing that the opposite of the wrong conclusion is true. For example, if there’s a chance of a reader thinking that Mr. Commitment-Phobe is nothing but a selfish bastard, show him at his most generous. Maybe let him take a kid under his wing. Something like that. Something that shows that not only is the guy generous, he’s only worried about committing to a woman.

What about you? How do you handle motivation – especially for difficult characters?

Today was cleaning day, as family and friends will be arriving for my mother’s birthday tomorrow. So after baking the cakes and delicious things, the rest of the day was pretty much spent washing floors.

It’s not my most favorite thing in the world, but I at least got some time and mindless activity that allowed me to think about my June 30 goal.

I still need to finish the WiP2 rewrite before I start Doorways edits, since I won’t have time for it later. So that means that the WiP2 rewrite has to be done by about 31 January. I’m about a quarter of the way through it, but since I did most of it in ten days, I don’t think my goal is all that impossible.

That way, once I am finished with Doorways, I have another story to edit and one to finish drafting, whichever I feel like doing first.

In the long run, I always want a project in the mail somewhere. For that to happen, I have to lay the foundation now.

Then I want to finish Don’t Look Back before the end of 2012. Hopefully I’ll be on the Doorways sequel by 2013? We’ll have to wait and see.

What about you? Have you set yourself any deadlines for next year? Let’s hear them.